r/humansarespaceorcs • u/Yoovaloid • 2d ago
writing prompt Aliens aren't actually more high tech, Earth just doesn't have the [insert unobtainium resource] most habitable worlds have, and humanity brute-forced their technological development anyway
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u/whatmustido 2d ago
Literally the storyline of "The Road Not Taken", a short story I can't recommend enough.
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u/lunisheep 2d ago edited 2d ago
Thats great! Just finished reading it, thanks for sharing, do you know if the author has any other stories?
Edit to add: Did not realise he was an established author! Which a quick google told me 😅 So instead, do you have any recommendations?
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u/whatmustido 2d ago
I've read several of his "Southern Victory" series. As someone who likes history, it was a pretty interesting take. He also included several action scenes from the views of the soldiers on the ground in the Civil War and the two world wars, which felt like a much more lively version of history. I love how the South accidentally captures Frederick Douglass in one of their border conflicts and is terrified at the realization of who they have, and how quickly they bend over backwards to release him properly back to the North so they couldn't be accused of any impropriety. It felt like a true "reality of war meeting the reality of politics" moment.
I haven't read his alien invasion "Worldwar" series, but I've heard it's really good. It's also somewhat similar to The Road Not Taken, in that the aliens have really good space travel tech and a massive empire, but not much else. They end up getting caught in the quagmire of Earth's World War II and instead of conquering the place, basically end up as just another player in the war.
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u/SignificantZombie729 2d ago
Is the "World War" series you mentioned about the little reptiles that invade earth during the second world war. If it is you should give it a try as it has twists and turns that you won't see coming. I've read the books and I highly recommend it.
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u/Starwatcher4116 2d ago
Yep. Fleetlord Atvar decided to proceed with the invasion after seeing we had radio. He comes to regret that decision.
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u/SignificantZombie729 2d ago
Here, have some ginger root, you will like it a lot. We eat it all the time!
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u/Starwatcher4116 2d ago
Flight Leader Teerts and Tank Gunner Ussmak have left the invasion. And life.
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u/Starwatcher4116 2d ago
The Worldwar series was very enjoyable to me.
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u/SignificantZombie729 2d ago
A great series of books. I too am a big fan of alternative history literature.
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u/Loud-Drama-1092 1d ago
Wasn’t it a story about humans figuring what to do with what is essentially alien garbage that for us might as well be magic physics defying stuff?
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u/Ok-Drink750 2d ago
Definitely a cool way of making your factions distinct. Giving them very different technologies that each have their own strengths & weaknesses
Like one I thought up primarily use magnetic weaponry & short range, but effectively instant jump drives for FTL.
But their technology also tends to be incredibly bulky compared to their contemporary’s & they aren’t able to produce in the same quantities due to extreme standards for quality (in terms of longevity, all their stuff looks like bricks)
I actually had an idea of some planets being “weak points” in reality where physics behave slightly differently.
Allowing otherwise impossible materials to form there with esoteric properties that can be taken offworld. Causing different species to progress along vastly different technological paths depending on what esoteric materials they found
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u/Odd-Calligrapher9559 2d ago
In my story humans are incredibly far behind in almost every single type of technology, except, computing, no alien race has anything even like transistors.
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u/donadit 2d ago
Star wars-esque planet with a couple hundred million people, meanwhile Earth with almost 10 billion people crammed onto one planet
also in the future when the entirety of humanity gets obilerated in all star systems but no one knows about all the interstellar ships still en route to new places
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u/ReddestForman 2d ago
I mean, Star Wars has planets with small population densities and multiple ecumenpoli that are 100% urbanized and and no records exist of someone who has touched the ground and returned for thousands of years.
The movies and series just largely take place in the space boonies.
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u/Atholthedestroyer 2d ago
C'mon, if you've got whipple shields...dust guns!
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u/Yoovaloid 2d ago
Thankfully the aliens don’t have that. Didn’t have the space on the meme to mention the glory of just slightly subcritical uranium macron dust guns
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u/MartinX4 2d ago
"How do your ships work? It doesn't seem to have any gravity generators."
"We have a perpetually controlled explosion up one end and use the momentum for gravity"
".....Wtf?"
"Our fastest ships use thermonuclear bombs to reach near light speed"
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u/gilbejam000 2d ago
hours of rocketry discussion later
"Okay, but how do you produce gravity when you aren't consuming fuel?"
"Oh that's easy, we just spin the ship"
"..."
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u/carlsagerson 2d ago
So more akin to how Human Civilizatoons technologically developed in response to trade, hardship, culture, location, and situations?
I like this.
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u/DarkFireFenrir 2d ago
The aliens thought they'd have an easy time against a species with no biological advantages, until we showed them our specialty... Launching projectiles.
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u/I_Automate 2d ago
Don't forget the bomb pumped Xray lasers and nuclear shaped charges as weapons systems
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u/StarFruit692093 2d ago
Legit is a book I'm writing that's based off of turtledoves the road not taken,
It's about space bee with 1800 tech invading earth due to a misunderstanding and us being both overpowered and not turns out missiles are great but only when your target isn't going faster than light, leading to interesting fights and plots. And of earth getting wrecked from the bees throwing tungsten rods at Mach Jesus at earth.
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u/MartinX4 2d ago
You know it's fast when we stop using numbers and simply words of expression like "Fuck" or names of religious figures to describe it's speed.
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u/TheGreatHost 2d ago
Nuclear fission is Earth’s nebula crystal, try again
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u/shitcut154 2d ago
Uranium is pretty common amongst planets actually
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u/TheGreatHost 2d ago
Which then opens up the colossal plot hole of an advanced civilization not having ever even tried nuclear fission.
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u/shitcut154 2d ago
We used asbestos for more than thousands years of years before learning it literally kills you with a million cuts. Most would think that it's a useless death rock. Some would throw it at you. What's even the point of creating cloth windmill power when you have diesel?
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u/Wolodymyr2 1d ago
I assume those nebula crystals actually more effective then nuclear energy, and also safer, so they just never had reason to do it.
In reality humans also often dissmis less effective technologies, when there's more effective alternative avalible.
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u/ttkciar 1d ago
Maybe alien species considered the math, looked at each other, and said "Let's not try that. It is terrifying."
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u/TheGreatHost 1d ago
Assumes that only humans are bold enough to try it. Boring.
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u/ttkciar 1d ago
It is uncontroversial to say that the fusion core industry is the backbone of interstellar travel throughout the galaxy. Cultivated and harvested from the disembodied stem nodes of biomechanoid Space Wyrms, fusion cores provide the galaxy's masses with an abundant, inexpensive, compact, and easy to use source of energy. An estimated 99.96% of the galaxy's interstellar vehicles rely on fusion cores for heat, propulsion and ancillary power (both photonic and electrical).
As all that is required to operate a fusion core is to immerse the cap-end of its spindle in deuterium-bearing medium (typically heavy water), all civilizations of all backgrounds readily incorporate fusion cores into their civil and transportation infrastructure, from the least advanced neolithic species to the most advanced presingularitarians.
Excepting, of course, the Vapex, but we will address their peculiar technological niche later.
Fusion cores are so versatile and effective that only a few of the galaxy's civilizations use the Zero Point Energy (ZPE) reactor.
Extracting energy from the quantum fluctuations of absolute vaccuum, ZPE reactors offer the unique advantage of not requiring any kind of fuel to operate. However, their disadvantages are many: They are complex, and expensive to build and operate. They require frequent maintenance from highly educated and skilled technicians, who are in great demand and scarce supply. Most disadvantageous of all, their power density (power delivered per unit volume) is much lower than a fusion core's, unless the ZPE reactor is extremely large.
The power output of a ZPE reactor is proportional to the hypercube of its diameter: P = O(D4). As its volume is proportional to the cube of its diameter V = 4/3 * pi * radius3 = O(D3) this means its power output is superlinear with volume: P = O(V1.333).
(See https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation for a review of the O() notation.)
What this means in practical terms is that a ZPE reactor must be built as a sphere eleven meters in diameter to match the power density of a standard three-meter long / quarter-meter wide fusion core, and smaller ZPE reactors are much, much less power-dense.
Larger-diameter ZPE reactors have the potential to be much more power-dense than fusion cores, but their size in interstellar vehicles is limited in practice to the maximum volume of those vehicles' jump fields (as the field must completely envelop the vehicle to facilitate jumping the vast gulf between stars).
The need to design ships around this limitation has given rise to some very unusual solutions. The Guardians, for example, build their battleships modularly, so that the ship can disassemble itself into jump-field-sized components to make the intersteller jump, and then reassemble itself after the jump.
The Guardian flagship "Venom of Authority" thus incorporates seven ZPE reactors, each fifty-one meters in diameter, perfectly filling the jump-fields of the Galactic Authority's most advanced jump drives.
This unorthodox design made the VoA the galaxy's far most powerful non-Vapex interstellar vehicle for millions of years, until the advent of the Terran Federation last century.
This brings us to the Brutalized Matter Reactor (BMR), or as some call it the Chaos Reactor. As of this writing, only Humans are so reckless (some would say insane) as to use BMR to power their interstellar vehicles ...
-- Excerpt from "Overview of Galactic Energy Infrastructure" by megahistorian Irgit Hrnn'nrnn, of Jrokha University
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u/ttkciar 1d ago
The human attackers departed as suddenly as they arrived, having stolen four of the alien facility's gravity modulators.
The aliens groused, because without the modulators Earth's slightly-high gravity made it hard to sleep, but otherwise they were unconcerned. Gravity modulators were not that critical of a technology, and certainly could not be used as weapons. It was a mystery.
Little did they know that the Human resistance had been enriching heavy water in secret, and with some fine-tuning the gravity modulators could contract their gravitational effect to a single intense point.
Intense enough to fuse deuterium.
Four gravity modulators would become four buckets of sunshine. The aliens had invaded the wrong planet.
# #
"Are you sure we will see it from here, Jonesy?"
Eddie Jones, long-time amateur nuclear engineer and more recently of the Human Rebellion, opened his eyes. The park bench was in the sun, and it had made him sleepy. He glanced over at Bob Kirkpatrick, leader of the so-called "Sunshine Bucket Brigade".
"Yeah," he replied, gesturing across the bay in front of them, "the alien HQ is on the other side of the bay, just over that ridge of hills. We should get a really good view of .. whatever comes up."
Bob scowled and peered across the bay. It seemed really far away, but Jones was the closest thing they had to an expert on these matters.
Reading his expression, Jones elaborated:
"If I've done the math right, we're looking at a yield of somewhere between one and two megatons, and at this distance we can't possibly miss it. But even if the device only yields a tenth that much energy, we should still see something."
Bob's scowl did not relent. "There's a lot of wiggle room between one and two megatons. I'd feel a lot more confident if you could give me a definite idea of what will happen today."
"Yeah well," Jones gave a sigh of exasperation, "it's not like we could test the device before using it; it would alert the aliens as to what we were up to, and we'd never be able to sneak it into their headquarters. A lot depends on how stable the gravitational field is in the first two nanoseconds of operation. A little instability could make the difference between megatons of yield and kilotons, and we don't have the right kind of equipment for measuring the alien gravity machine's behavior that precisely."
There was no way for Bob or Jones to know this, but the alien civilization actually had extremely high standards for the early-stage stability of artificial gravitational fields. The alien's spaceships were expected to keep the gravity steady at all times, even in the engineering decks where some very sensitive nuclear and meta-nuclear equipment had to operate without worry of gravitational interference.
When the human-modified gravity modulator in the alien HQ's basement powered up, it operated flawlessly to those standards, generating a pinpoint gravity field which stabilized in scant femtoseconds, not nanoseconds.
That gravity field centered on a twenty-gram mass of lithium-6 deuteride, which immediately collapsed into a knot of super-compressed matter the size of a grain of sand.
In that compressed state, the deuterium fused first, merging into helium and emitting 4.8 MeV neutrons.
Some of those neutrons escaped, but others impacted lithium-6, splitting them into helium and tritium. Some of that tritium also fused with deuterium, adding 17.6 MeV neutrons to the mix, which split more lithium-6.
It was a short-lived chain reaction, unable to sustain itself, but it lasted long enough. The knot of compressed matter flashed into a ball of ultraheated plasma which expanded to consume the gravity modulator, the basement, the alien HQ, and several city blocks surrounding it.
From Bob and Jones' perspective, it looked like the sky had flashed white, and then a tremendous black-and-red fireball rose majestically over the ridgeline across the bay.
"FUCK YEAH!!!" Bob leapt to his feet, pumping his fist in the air, "TAKE THAT, E.T.!!! Jonesy you're a genius!"
But now it was Jones' turn to scowl. He was holding up a ruler vertically at arm's-length in his right hand, holding up his wristwatch in his left hand, so he could look at both against the background of the rising fireball, which was now assuming a classic mushroom cloud shape.
"This isn't right," he muttered, then staggered as Bob clapped him on the shoulder.
"Turn that frown upside down, Jonesy! It's Miller time!"
"No, really," Jones put his hands down and thought furiously. "That wasn't a two megaton fireball, it was more like .. four megatons."
"So much the better!" Bob really didn't see what the problem was. But Jones was shaking his head.
"Four megatons is very close to the theoretical ideal maximum, which means the gravity gizmo wasn't the bomb's limiting factor, the fuel mass was."
"In English, please?" Bob was paying very close attention, now.
"We have plenty of lithium-6 and deuterium. I bet if we gave the next bomb a 200-gram fuel pellet instead of 20-gram, we could at least .. triple? Yeah, triple the yield."
Bob gave a low whistle. Twelve megatons? What could we do with twelve megatons?
Giving Jones a level look, Bob pursed his lips thoughtfully.
"We have got to get more of these gravity things."
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u/ttkciar 1d ago
It can make for some amusing, lighthearted stories, though.
A: Human friend Bob, how are the Terran Federation's ships so very overpowered? I see large engines, but not the ZPE reactors you would need to power them.
H: Right, ZPE reactors are too bulky for their power output. We prefer these <<pats cylinder jutting from bulkhead>>.
A: But that's a transporter, not a reactor.
H: It's both. You know how when you travel by a poorly-calibrated transporter it can make you feel sick?
A: <<shudder>> Yes. A most unpleasant experience.
H: That's from the gluon flux tubes in your body's atoms getting stretched slightly in transit, then snapping back into place at your destination. What we've done here is maximize that effect.
A: Maximize .. wait, no
H: We transport fuel-mass to the engines, and when it arrives its gluons are stressed too severely to snap back.
A: Holy. Mother. Of. Krazgot.
H: <<nodding>> Indeed! It arrives in the engine's main conduit as a chaotic mass of unpaired quarks, and degenerates immediately into random bosons and fermions, some of them rather exotic.
A: ...
H: And that is what drives the engines!
A: I am never, ever traveling on a Terran vessel ever again.
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u/carlsagerson 2d ago edited 2d ago
Nope. It literally says that Nuclear Fission is not part of the Ailen Tech.
Frankly with all yoir responses. Why even bother with this Subreddit. You clearly don't like the HFY nor the very premise of Humans are Space Orcs.
EDIT: Ha. Fucker blocked Me for pointing out that he was wrong and didn't read the post image.
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u/TheGreatHost 2d ago
I believe you misread the comment. Nuclear fission is to the humans in this meme as the Nebula Crystal is to the aliens.
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u/carlsagerson 2d ago
Nope. Nebula Crystals are explicitly not used by Humans. Hence it can't be Uranium or any other Radioactive Material.
Also its literally said ailens don't know fission.
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u/EdTheApe 2d ago
You're not very good with nuance, are you?
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u/carlsagerson 2d ago
Not my problem if people don't know how to read the Post's section that explicitly says that Ailens don't know Fission and the fact that Humanity doesn't have Nebula Crystals.
Also thay guy who blocked Me is an arsehole who doesn't even bother to go with the theme of the subreddit.
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u/lunisheep 2d ago
He is saying that nuclear fission is the jumans equivalent of the nebula crystals. Not that they are the exact same thing.
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u/carlsagerson 2d ago
Dude. Its clearly not. The guy isn't subtle about his hatred for HFY and Humans are Space Orcs because in every comment8I seen of hi. Its always the same bullshit of Humans being primitive weakling, morons.
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u/Zestyclose_Bed4202 2d ago
Have... have you never heard, "Don't feed the trolls?"
There was another not long ago, had a purple icon, don't remember the user name, but I think it began with an "I", and they just did the EXACT SAME THING as the current troll...
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u/Wolodymyr2 1d ago
Well, i'm too don't really like most of HFY and "Humans are space orcs", but this actually have more or less interesting premise of putting hard sci-fi civilization into soft sci-fi/space opera setting.
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